This invention relates in general to automated attendant telephony directory systems and more specifically to an inventive combination of a directory system providing a non-linear search and an intuitive navigation scheme.
Automated telephony attendant systems are known in the art for answering telephone calls and for helping to direct a caller to a requested party. Such systems allow the caller to call and contact or leave a message for an employee at any time during the day without having to worry about the message not being received.
One feature of some prior art automated telephony attendant systems is the ability of a caller to select items (e.g. persons or departments) without human intervention. According to one type of item selection telephony interface, the caller spells the name or title of an item using a telephone keypad. Speech recognition can alternatively be employed where the caller speaks the name or title of the item and the system selects the correct item. In some systems, a sequential listing of all items is played to the caller along with an indication of which digits must be entered in order to select each item. Some prior art systems employ a combination of these techniques for item selection.
One problem with the first mentioned prior art item selection technique is the difficulty experienced by many callers in mentally translating a name from letters to numbers in accordance with the keypad on a telephone. It is quite difficult for many callers to perform this instantaneously. Also, in some countries, telephones do not include letters on the keypad. Speech recognition technology is not sufficiently well developed to function accurately with different timbres of input voice, accents, speech impediments, etc. In connection with the last mentioned item selection technique, there is also a problem of forcing the caller to spend a considerable amount of time listening to the list if the required item is at the end.
According to the present invention, an automated telephony attendant is provided in which a caller is presented with an opportunity to select an item from a list of items (e.g. the name of an employee in a company). For example, a list of employee names may be stored in a database (often a long list) and communicated to the caller using text-to-speech or prerecorded voice. Telephone keypad inputs are used to navigate the caller to different locations in the list (e.g. xe2x80x98To move forward in the list press xe2x80x9c3xe2x80x9d, to move backward in the list press xe2x80x9c1xe2x80x9dxe2x80x99). Functional keypad navigation allows the caller to jump to the start of the list, to the end of the list, forward or backward.
The present invention provides a unique algorithm implemented in a telephony interface for browsing items in an item list, which overcomes the prior art problems discussed above. Firstly, callers are not required to mentally translate a name from letters to numbers in order to arrive at the correct item. There is no requirement for complex and unreliable voice recognition systems. Also, callers may simply navigate through the list using predefined forward and backward navigational function keys, rather than having to listen to the entire list.
According to one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method for allowing a caller to select an item from a list in a telephony interface comprising the steps of:
a) assigning predetermined navigational functions to respective caller keypad entries for navigating through said list;
b) assigning a selection function to a further caller keypad entry;
c) playing an initial item in said list to said caller;
d) receiving a signal representing an input caller keypad entry and
i ) in the event said signal representing said input caller keypad entry corresponds to one of said predetermined caller keypad entries then navigating to a next item in said list and playing said next item to said caller, and
ii) in the event said signal representing said input caller keypad entry corresponds to said selection function then selecting said item for said caller.
e) in the event no signal representing an input caller keypad entry is received from said caller then navigating to the next item automatically.
According to a second aspect of the present invention, there is provided a telephony interface item selection system comprising:
a database containing an item list; and
a computer program for communicating items in said list to a caller, for associating keys from a telephone keypad with specific navigational functions, and for receiving and translating keypad entries from said caller into predetermined ones of said navigational functions and in response navigating to predetermined locations in said list for communicating items at said predetermined locations.